Saturday, December 09, 2006

Blast From the Recent Past - Volcan Pacaya


Fired up my printers and scanners today, the first time since the big move. The Epson C80 printer isn't real happy, I must have cleaned the nozzles a dozen times, but it should be good enough to print letters, homework and such. The Canon i960 photo printer, which we use primarily for photos, seemed to work fine on the first try. Then I fired up the scanner, the Konica-Minolta DiMage Elite-5400. It made horrible grinding noises and wouldn't load the slide or the negative carrier. This has been a problem before, but it is now way out of warranty and Konica-Minolta is out of the camera and scanner business. I took it apart and could see nothing obvious wrong. Then I did a heap of research on the internet to see if I could find any reference to someone fixing this problem themselves. It was no trouble finding reference to the problem, but besides those who sent it back under warranty, solutions were so rare as to be non-existent. As I was giving up hope, I found an old forum posting and discussion, and tagged on at the end, relatively recently (Sept 06) the original poster with the problem came back to say that pressing control,shift and "i" as the scanning software loaded solves the problem. I was skeptical, since the grinding gears etc all seem to be clearly hardware problems...but try it I did...and shazaam! it cleared up the problem. Above is one of the slides I had loaded in the scanner. It is also my first scan using Photoshop CS2 vice the merely the scanner software and a little bit of Elements 2.0

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